Legend has it that dying threats from disgruntled samurai warriors have been behind Japan’s first cricket match in 1863 and the game has battled for recognition within the baseball-mad nation ever since.
However Japan’s cricket affiliation, which operates out of a disused college close to a wooded mountain, says the game is slowly gaining reputation and hopes subsequent yr’s residence Asian Video games and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics can take it to a brand new degree.
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“My entire 11 years right here have been about attempting to offer folks with alternatives to play,” mentioned Englishman Alan Curr, Japan Cricket Affiliation’s chief operations officer.
“That is quite a bit simpler in the event that they know the game exists. Finally, you may’t be what you may’t see.”
Curr says cricket is rising yearly in Japan with greater than 5,000 adults and kids enjoying the sport usually and about thrice as many having tried it in some type.
That’s nonetheless a drop within the ocean in comparison with Japanese baseball, which is performed by thousands and thousands and produces international superstars such because the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani.
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The 2 sports activities arrived in Japan at roughly the identical time, though cricket’s origins have been barely much less auspicious.
A samurai risk to kill all foreigners who refused to depart Japan prompted a bunch of European residents to hunt safety from the British navy in Yokohama.
That they had a sport of cricket to go the time, enjoying with loaded weapons tucked into their belts to protect towards doable assault.
A Scottish tea service provider based the primary cricket membership in Japan 5 years later but it surely didn’t catch on past expatriate circles.
Quick ahead to the late Eighties and several other universities started enjoying — “college students have been searching for one thing distinctive”, in line with international governing physique the ICC.
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– Spreading the phrase –
The game has maintained a distinct segment presence, though rising numbers of South Asian residents in Japan have boosted the enjoying inhabitants.
Japan’s nationwide groups replicate the game’s Commonwealth roots, that includes a number of gamers with dad and mom from cricket-playing international locations.
The JCA, based in 1984, has labored laborious to introduce cricket to folks with no earlier expertise, concentrating their efforts on chosen hubs across the nation.
Japan girls’s Twenty20 captain Mai Yanagida instructed AFP she “knew the title however did not actually know what sort of sport it was” till she took up cricket at Waseda College in Tokyo.
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“I performed softball and baseball earlier than that, however in cricket you may hit the ball 360 levels,” she mentioned on the Ladies’s Sano Metropolis Worldwide Trophy this month.
“I believe it is extra a sport the place you could play collectively as a workforce.”
The Sano Metropolis event was performed at Japan’s cricket headquarters about 100 km (60 miles) exterior of Tokyo, on the enjoying subject of a highschool that closed its doorways greater than a decade in the past.
After dropping their opening sport, Japan went on to elevate the trophy, beating Hong Kong within the closing of a event that additionally featured fellow cricketing minnows China, the Philippines and Mongolia.
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The win got here weeks after Japan’s males certified for subsequent yr’s Underneath-19 World Cup in Zimbabwe and Namibia.
– From baseball to cricket –
Cricket will function at subsequent yr’s Asian Video games in Japan earlier than it returns to the Olympic programme for the primary time since 1900 on the Los Angeles Video games.
Japan’s girls gained bronze on the 2010 Asian Video games and the boys made their debut on the 2023 version, ending with one win and one defeat.
The lads’s workforce featured former skilled baseball participant Shogo Kimura, who took up cricket in 2017 after a 14-year profession with a few of Japan’s greatest groups.
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Yanagida believes the Asian Video games in Nagoya-Aichi and the Olympics can “have a very large affect” on cricket’s profile in Japan.
“It is going to be within the information as an Olympic sport so the media can assist the title cricket turn into extra broadly recognized,” she mentioned.
Qualifying for LA shall be a tall order for Japan, whose males’s T20 workforce are ranked forty second on this planet, with the ladies forty third.
All of the gamers are amateurs and Curr says organising video games towards groups from exterior Asia could be tough.
He concedes that there’s “no silver bullet” to make cricket genuinely common in Japan however that won’t cease those that love the game from attempting.
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“You are not an in a single day success, there’s all the time a variety of stuff that goes on behind it and we’re in that part now,” mentioned Curr.
“We’re constructing a platform that we hope can then shock folks in some unspecified time in the future.”
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